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Caustic Graphics Will Provide Linux Support

Phoronix: Caustic Graphics Will Provide Linux Support

Caustic Graphics, a brand-new company to the computer graphics scene that hopes to compete with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA when it comes to ray-tracing power, announced the CausticRT on Monday. The CausticRT is "the world's first massively accelerated ray-tracing system" and can be found in CausticOne, which is their first product and it promises to deliver ray-tracing performance that's reportedly 20 times faster than the modern computer...

I really doubt these guys will be in business in a years time let alone long enough to actually have linux support. Cell cards for example have existed for a while and still are far and few and have never made it into the mainstream as have many other DSP cards both past and future. My guess is that they will pull a Physx, develop a tech and pray like hell someone buys them out in this day and age where only the financially suicidal invest in startup tech companies.

I also really doubt that some guys around can challenge ATI, Nvidia and Intel in a year.
Nvidia and ATI have more than 10 years of experience of graphics cards and 3D acceleration. I there was a magical solution to accelerate 200 times the current GPUs, I guess they would have use it !

Their accelerator doesn't look like it replaces a conventional GPU at all, but instead acts as a sort of "graphics accelerator accelerator" for raytracing and similarly complex operations, much like PhysX cards did for physics operations. Anyway, it's not clear to me that they intend to offer a consumer product; all their marketing text seems to be talking about content creation (render farms, prototyping complex 3D models/scenes, etc.).

Originally Posted by deanjo

Cell cards for example have existed for a while and still are far and few and have never made it into the mainstream

As far as I know, none of the Cell card vendors have any interest in mainstream customers; they'd rather soak R&D types for 10x the cash per card that they could ever hope to get from a mainstream user.

As far as I know, none of the Cell card vendors have any interest in mainstream customers; they'd rather soak R&D types for 10x the cash per card that they could ever hope to get from a mainstream user.

The ones that did say they were bringing out a mainstream implementation have already faded into the night but even in the renderfarm / research /etc arena they have made little to no impact. Until they are able to bring the product out in mass production in a cheap fashion ATI and NV have nothing to fear.

As far as not planing to cater to everyone that isn't exactly the impression they are trying to instill. If you hit their main page you will see referencing to gaming by the reviews they posted and if you watch the flash animation you may notice the "Rated E for Everyone" logo that implies that it is indeed meant for the mainstream consumer as well.

I really doubt these guys will be in business in a years time let alone long enough to actually have linux support.

I guess you were wrong (on the first part at least ).
Not that they can't still disappear, but they're still here as of now.
Seems like they will be at the Mobile World Congress 2011 with ImgTec: http://www.caustic.com/company_events.php